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The Dance Of The Week is a dance that hasn’t been danced a great deal in recent years but is an easy to learn dance with plenty of swinging. Click through for notes and music links of the Lusmagh Set and if anyone has video of this set being danced, please share!

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This week we’ve got an Irish set dance from county Clare called the Labasheeda Reel Set, sometimes just the Reel Set. Make sure you get a good breakfast because this set has up to 7 figures.

Why “up to?” Because figure 5 has a variation that is sometimes danced along with the others. In any case, you’ll want to confer with the rest of your set to decide which version of figure 5 you’ll be doing if they’ll only be doing one of them.

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It’s add some dances day! The latest dance to be added to DanceMinder is the Tory Island Lancers. On the site you’ll find the full notes, music and video links. If you have any additional video links please let us know!

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Since adding the ability to show embedded videos we’ve recognized that the default size is very small, rather than make it larger by default we’ve also had a link which would quickly take you to a new window where you could view the video in larger format.

If you’ve wished that the embedded videos were larger, wish no more. You can now make them as large or small as you like.

After opening the Videos section while viewing a dance

Just grab either the right edge, bottom edge or bottom-right corner and drag until the video is the size you want

.

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In addition to the back-end simplification for adding Contra dances (which has resulted in even more being added in the last few days) we’ve made some additions to the search capability in DanceMinder.

You can now search on the Fun and Difficulty ratings for a dance. Select what you are interested in from one or more of the drop down controls and DanceMinder will return dances with the rating you’ve selected. Keep in mind that DanceMinder will return a combination of all the filters that have been applied. If you need to start fresh, just click on the Reset filters link.

If a dance doesn’t show up based on the difficulty or fun rating you’ve chosen that means that the dance either hasn’t been rated, or there haven’t been enough ratings given. You might need to get out there and do some rating of your own!

After St. Patrick’s season has concluded, we’ll make another modification to this search so that any dance rated higher than or equal to the level you’ve chose will show up in the results. For now, it’s just equal to.

Text search has been expanded to include the figure and movement descriptions so that you’ll now see many more hits when searching on things like “christmas” or other words that typically only appear in the movement titles or descriptions.

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A Collection on DanceMinder is simply a list of dances. These can be used as a series of dances for a public event, dances you’d like to study, dances for a class or for any purpose you like. A collection includes a description and a field for a location where you can put the name of a studio, hall or even town crossroads.

If you’re not a member of DanceMinder you may be wondering what kind of information is saved as part of your account. Here’s a look at how to sign up and what information you need to supply and what’s optional.

The first step of course is to sign up. This can be done through the Account menu.

You’ll be taken to the Sign Up page where you can choose a User Name, password and where you can enter your email address.